UCAR and Partners Realize 10 Gigabits per Second Goal
for Education
and Research

February 20, 2006

BOULDER—National LambdaRail (NLR), a consortium of leading U.S.
research universities and private sector technology companies including
the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research (UCAR), today announced
that it has completed deployment of a nationwide advanced optical, Ethernet
and IP networking infrastructure on more than 10,000 miles of fiber optic
cable across the United States.

"Our participation in National LambdaRail enables a wide range
of network and application research and support for the atmospheric and
Earth-systems science community," says Marla Meehl, manager of Network
Engineering and Telecommunications for UCAR's National Center for Atmospheric
Research.

Thanks to the increased flexibility and capacity of the new network,
scientists will be able to link models and move data faster and more
reliably on dedicated lines. For example, the National Center for Atmospheric
Research's premier climate model, the Community Climate System Model,
will be used for runs of future climate in the next year that will require
four times the current data volume. For these experiments, it will take
less than an hour to move a volume of data that now takes more than seven
hours. In addition to such scientific work, network engineers will also
be able to acquire experimental bandwidth in order to test improvements
to the system without disrupting traffic.

Meehl notes that UCAR's involvement in National LambdaRail grew out
of participation in the Front Range GigaPOP, a consortium of universities,
nonprofit corporations, and government agencies that share Wide Area
Networking services. Besides UCAR, Front Range GigaPOP members participating
in the National LambdaRail project are the Colorado School of Mines,
Colorado State University, University of Colorado at Boulder, University
of Colorado at Denver, NOAA Boulder labs, University of Utah, and the
University of Wyoming.

The new technology supports research in science, engineering, health
care, and education, as well as the research and development of new Internet
technologies, protocols, applications and services.

The University Corporation for Atmospheric Research is a consortium
of 69 universities offering Ph.D.s in the atmospheric and related sciences.
UCAR manages the National Center for Atmospheric Research and the UCAR
Office of Programs.

National LambdaRail, Inc. (NLR) is a major initiative of U.S. research
universities and private sector technology companies to provide a national
scale infrastructure for research and experimentation in networking technologies
and applications. NLR puts the control, the power and the promise of
experimental network infrastructure in the hands of our nation's scientists
and researchers.

UCAR is a contributing member of the National LambdaRail consortium, which
has completed a network with 10 times the bandwidth of current systems
in order to promote research on the scientific and networking fronts.
(Illustration courtesy National LambdaRail.)

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